Google Sitemaps Priority

The priority tag in the Google sitemap XML schema, do you think Google
really take notice of it? I'm creating a script now to make my sitemaps and
thinking of writing some fancy code to allocate higher priority to more
popular pages on my site, but then I was thinking, will it really influence
the Bot.

This is my first sitemap, anyone have evidence that it does matter in
crawling. And I know it doesn't matter an iota in ranking.

Thanks,
Georgie